


until then

by nigiyakapepper



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Lazy Mornings, Morning Cuddles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:47:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26970871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigiyakapepper/pseuds/nigiyakapepper
Summary: The sweep of Krolia’s thumb across his cheek brings him back to her. Her palm is so warm. Everything about her is warm. His gaze flicks back to hers and she’s smiling, untroubled and gentle.“What are you thinking about?”His mouth moves before his brain does. He likes to think himself an honest man, but she makes him act in earnest. “If y’really are happy here…”(Or Papa K and momma get some lazy morning cuddles.)
Relationships: Keith's Father/Krolia (Voltron)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 21





	until then

He loves the way she smells.

He runs his nose across the gentle lavender of her skin barely suppressing greedy breaths he takes. He used to think he’d finally know the scent of stars, or taste ozone at the back of his tongue. But he likes this much better. She smells of a warm body, clean skin, of sweetness in the hollow where her shoulder meets her neck, sweetness where her nape meets her hair.

He looks in wonder at her marks. They’re a darker shade – precise, symmetrical lines that start at the high points of her cheeks, glide down behind her shoulders, swirl toward the front of her belly before curing towards the dimples on her back, deeper than any human’s should be.

There are scars along the trail of it. She has all sorts of scars everywhere. He traces them with his fingertips, wondering how she got them, what made them, what alien medicines helped her heal, what was going through her mind, had she been thinking at all and not fueled by instincts and adrenaline. He’d like to say he understands how it feels, but fire, shoddy architecture, and gravity don’t exactly move with vengeance or relentless killing intent. They just are.

One healed in the shape of a donut, possibly laser burn from some blaster with a weird barrel if the cheesy old sci-fi movies he watched are anything to go by. It doesn’t look new – lighter, kinda shiny, stretched the skin rather than warped it. He presses his lips to it in a reverent kiss.

…then bites down because he can’t help it.

Krolia laughs softly from the circle of his arms. He knows she’s been awake for a while, but it’s his day off and they’re staying in bed, indulgently. She rolls to face him and runs her hands through his hair, slight claws scratching deliciously across his scalp.

“What are you doing, silly man?” She’s held his hair away from his forehead in one hand, and papped his cheeks with the other in what he supposes is payback.

“Sayin’ good mornin’,” he says, voice still rumbly from sleep. His heart slowly fills as she smooths the lines of his mouth with her thumb, then his jaw. Her gaze is calm but intense.

“The short hairs on your chin are prickly.”

He laughs and digs said chin into the warmth of her hand. The word ‘stubble’ escapes her still, but he doesn’t mind. He knows she loves the rasp of it against her anyway, like a cat’s tongue, she once said. And it bemused him that both Earth and Galra had similar enough variations of cats (though Galra cats had been brought over by an ancient civilization called Altea, whatever that was.)

Part of him still wonders what she really thinks of all this, stuck in a little backwater planet for possibly the rest of her life (ominously longer than his. He doesn’t want to think about it much, if at all, in the quiet, rare nights she falls asleep before he does.) He wonders if it was really alright with her to just decide that her next directive would be to protect this Blue Lion, if she misses any one of her crewmates. He wonders if she misses her life on the field.

When he had gotten injured on duty and was bedridden for a week, he got so stir crazy. He can’t imagine how it must be for Krolia, who’s a trained warrior, who’s been a soldier fighting all her life against an evil empire with zero guarantee of seeing victory within her lifetime.

But maybe, maybe, she always wanted this peace. Maybe she’s never lived with it.

The sweep of Krolia’s thumb across his cheek brings him back to her. Her palm is so warm. Everything about her is warm that he loves snuggling up to her on cold desert nights (and hot days, even if it makes them both sweaty and her hand meets his face before he can even get close). His gaze flicks back to hers and she’s smiling, untroubled and gentle.

“What are you thinking about?”

His mouth moves before his brain does. He likes to think himself an honest man, but she makes him act in earnest. “If y’really are happy here…”

Her eyes search his face and he wonders what she sees. She must sense some sort of distress because her thumb continues to stroke his cheek in a gesture of comfort.

“I don’t know.” Krolia is honest, too. “We used to hear Voltron in legends, both scornful and heroic. Rumors that Zarkon has the Red Lion in his possession are only that, as even his highest officers are forbidden to see it. Seeing the Blue Lion here—”

Something pinches in her expression, then eases. He might not know firsthand what the terrors of space war or an evil empire are like, but he feels the weight of it suddenly, that the love of his life is the only person standing in the way of the destruction of the only world he's ever known.

“—it gives me hope. I have to protect this planet.”

Her eyes dart away in thought. He loves her eyes; a beautiful, otherworldly combination of colors, luminous in the dark, parts set at depths different from his own but are similar enough that they agree on what colors look like, though he feels her world is more saturated than his. There’s not a lot of light in space. On Earth, there’s too much.

“I don’t know.” She looks at him and her expression stays thoughtful, a little troubled. He wonders if there’s guilt in guarding the apparently most sought-after warship in the universe, but not fighting in the front lines. He wonders if there’s a way they can communicate back to her crew, and if they can get Earth prepared in case of an actual alien invasion. It sounds absurd, but urgency wars with the lack of means. And so they are suspended, still.

He holds her hand in his and turns his face to kiss the center of her palm. “We’ll figure it out then,” he says.

Krolia smiles so sweetly. She scoots closer to him and presses a kiss to his forehead, then just stays there.

“I don’t think I’ve told you how you smell wonderful.” He feels her breaths move through his hair and something giddy bubbles up inside him. A helpless fondness. She merely chuffs and doesn’t ask when he laughs. He wants to tell her, too, that he thought the same. 

He closes his eyes and pulls her closer. His hand cups the back of her head, fingers buried in the thick softness of her hair. He feels her purr kick up in her chest and luxuriates in the feeling.

It isn’t quite dawn yet. So until then, until then…

**end**


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